Documents

Documents play an important role as evidence in the examination of mass crimes. This is where you find information on regulations for dealing with the past and on access to historical documents in selected countries.

Albania
The Albanian Sigurimi Law
The oversized national coat of arms is emblazoned on the front wall of the Albanian parliament. It was here in April 2015, twenty-five years after the end of one-party rule, that the deputies of the Socialist Party decided to open the files of the Sigurimi, the communist secret police. Since then, former victims of persecution and their relatives have been able to view the files that were collected on them. Academics and journalists also have access to the files. But critics say the law is [...Read more]
Argentina
The Argentine Reparation Laws
Argentine President Raúl Alfonsín has a serious expression on his face as he looks at the stack of papers handed to him by the writer Ernesto Sábato on 20 September 1984. The extensive report of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) documents for the first time in detail the systematic persecution that took place during the military dictatorship. Years later, comprehensive laws to compensate victims came into force in Argentina. It was one of the first truth commissions [...Read more]
A Dictatorship on Trial
General Videla, standing taut, opens the agricultural exhibition in Buenos Aires in July 1976. Only a few months earlier, the Argentine army had carried out a coup and made him president. In 1985, a court sentenced him to life in prison for kidnapping, torturing and murdering numerous opposition activists. After passing some 1000 additional sentences, Argentina became a pioneer in the criminal prosecution of dictatorships. When the military putsch took place on 24 March 1976, the military enjoyed [...Read more]
Cambodia
The Judgment in Case 001
Two survivors raising the judgement against Kaing Guek Eav, the former director of Prison S-21, in Case 001, as it is called in Cambodia. According to the court, under his leadership at least 12,273 people were tortured and executed. More than 30 years passed before the head of the Khmer Rouge’s death factory was convicted in 2010. Nevertheless, the verdict is a key document in Cambodia’s struggle for transitional justice. The decision of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia is [...Read more]
Chile
Addressing the Past through a Government Commission
The leaders of the Catholic Church paid their last respects to Sergio Valech, the deceased auxiliary bishop of Santiago de Chile, in November 2010. His name, more than any other, stands for the effort to address the past crimes of the military dictatorship in Chile. On behalf of the socialist president Ricardo Lagos, in 2004 the commission that he headed presented a 700-page report on human rights violations committed under General Pinochet. The decree calling for the establishment of the [...Read more]
Chile’s Compensation Laws
The one thousand logs that were erected in 2008 as a memorial in the city of Paine, south of Santiago de Chile, are meant to suggest an artificial forest. Gaps decorated with mosaics recall the 70 inhabitants who were executed or disappeared during the military dictatorship. But in Chile, victims are not only commemorated by numerous monuments. They have also been compensated by the state beginning in 1992. Six weeks after the Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin took office as president in March [...Read more]
Ethiopia
Documents and Photos in the German Federal Archives
The Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam maintained close relations with the Soviet Union and the GDR. He attended the opening of the SED’s 11th party congress in April 1986 and is seen standing in the front row. Few foreign politicians were allowed to get so close to those in power in the GDR: At the SED party congress in East Berlin, Mengistu is standing right next to Horst Sindermann, the president of the GDR People’s Assembly. Continuing from right to left: SED Secretary General Erich [...Read more]
Georgien
Georgia’s Freedom Charter
Street names like Stalin Avenue in Gori are no longer meant to exist. A 2011 law called for “the removal of symbols and names from the communist totalitarian regime, of cult buildings, monuments, memorials, bas-reliefs, inscriptions, streets, squares, villages and settlements.” The law, called the Freedom Charter, was also meant to remove former communist cadres from the state apparatus. But few of these lofty goals were ever realized. It took 20 years for the first law addressing the past [...Read more]
Germany
The German Compensation Laws
Prisoner uniforms in German concentration camps were marked by blue and white stripes. This conspicuous “zebra clothing” was supposed to make an escape more difficult. After the Nazi era, it became a symbol for former camp inmates. At memorial events, such as here at the Auschwitz Memorial on January 27, 2014, survivors often wore a blue and white striped scarf. In Germany, a whole series of laws and regulations were enacted to compensate the victims of political persecution. The first law [...Read more]
More than 400 kilometers of files
The clunky Federal Archives building in Koblenz is not very inviting. But for historians, the archive is a gold mine. Its nearly 900 employees manage over 400 kilometers of files, 13 million images and 155,000 films. As a rule, research in the archive is free of charge. The key to the source-based examination of the past is a special archive law. Germany has had a central state archive for more than 100 years. This is where the documents of the German Federation, the German Reich, the GDR and the [...Read more]
The Stasi Archive
The entrance to the Stasi Records Archive in the former Stasi headquarters in Berlin feels more like a side door. But behind it, 44 kilometers of once top-secret files from the GDR secret police are stored. An additional 68 kilometers are held in the 13 former GDR district capitals. It is a small miracle that so many documents of the State Security Service have survived. If it had been up to Stasi boss Erich Mielke and his successor Wolfgang Schwanitz, the most important documents of the GDR secret [...Read more]
Peru
Documentation of Terror
The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was handed over to Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo in August 2003, is 6000 pages long. It describes in detail massacres, murders, attacks, kidnappings, torture and sexual violence in Peru in the 1980s and 1990s. The authors of the nine-volume documentary subsequently received death threats and libel suits. The Commission, appointed in June 2001, had two years to investigate tens of thousands of acts of violence. Under its [...Read more]
Russia
The Russian Rehabilitation Law
Few photographs document the everyday life of prisoners in the Gulag. Artists have instead tried to capture the harsh living conditions in self-made pictures. This mural by Adam Schmidt is located in the cellar of the Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Saint Petersburg. In Soviet times, the church served as a camp and swimming pool. The church was renovated after the end of communism, but Gulag victims have received hardly any financial support. The Russian rehabilitation law is to blame. The human [...Read more]
Rwanda
Protocol of Horror
The indictment from attorney at Carla Del Ponte against Sylvestre Gacumbitsi, the mayor of the Rusuma community, was nine pages long. In blunt language she lists how he organized the murder of thousands of Tutsis in his district on the border to Tanzania. Her protocol was crucial in getting a life sentence for Gacumbitsi, who was one of the few people involved in the practical aspects of the genocide’s implementation. Del Ponte’s indictment is dated January 20, 2001. In it, she accuses the mayor [...Read more]
South Africa
Reconciliation Per Law
“We serve with pride” is written on the gate to the former high-security prison on Robben Island. The records from South Africa’s most famous detention center are now held in the Mayibuye archives. But the most comprehensive documentation of human rights violations on the Horn of Africa is still the seven-volume final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In 1995, the parliament passed a special law for the commission’s work. It is the key document on transitional justice in South [...Read more]
Taiwan
The Taiwan Transitional Justice Law
The names of many of the people who suffered political persecution are listed in close succession on the walls of this memorial on the former Green Island prisoner island. But only recently has Taiwan begun to more actively address the legacy of its past. A new “Law for the Promotion of Transitional Justice” led to the establishment of a commission that is meant to ensure that the events of the past be fully disclosed. The law came into force in December 2017 and has significantly improved [...Read more]
Compensation Claims
On February 28, 1947, an angry mob stormed the offices of the tobacco state monopoly in Taipei. Its employees had previously confiscated smuggled cigarettes from a street merchant. When the merchant protested, she was beaten with the butt of a rifle and shots were fired at people standing around. The incident triggered an uprising against the Kuomintang administration that was bloodily suppressed. Almost half a century later, the Taiwanese parliament passed a compensation law. Victims of the “228 [...Read more]
Tunisia
Coming to Terms with the Past by Law
Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali ruled Tunisia with an iron hand for 24 years. His secret police were notorious throughout in the Arab world, as was the kleptomania of his wife and family. On December 15, 2013, almost three years after his overthrow, the Constituent Assembly passed a law on transitional justice in Tunisia. There had been lengthy discussions about what form and direction the law should take. The law “on establishing and organizing transitional justice,” as the process of coming to terms with [...Read more]
Ukraine
The Law banning Totalitarian Symbols
Lenin Street 54 in Kherson: Just a few years ago, Soviet propaganda was omnipresent in Ukraine. In 2015, parliament passed a law banning Nazi and Communist symbols. Not only do the names of many streets and villages have to be changed, monuments and symbols also had to be removed. This process of “decommunization” also serves to create a new Ukrainian national consciousness – with some problematic excesses. The law “On condemning Communist and Nazi totalitarian regimes in Ukraine and prohibiting [...Read more]

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